Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary

WA’YLESS. adj. [from way.] Pathless; untracked.
When on upon my wayless walk,
As my desires me draw,
I, like a madman fell to talk
With every thing I saw. Drayton’s Queen of Cynthia.

The Canadian Poetry Festival (1980)

The event and its print rendering suggest how scattered Canadian poetry can be — even amongst the closest of poet-friends or within a given generation. Some participants aren’t even interested in the “Canada” question so much as in localism or the phenomenology of language or literary community. Some participants seem, at times, completely uninterested in or marginalized by the parameters of debate altogether. (Atwood, it’s reported, didn’t even stay for the full festival and when she was there wasn’t much of a “presence.” D.G. Jones has the thankless task of trying to remind festival-goers of the burgeoning formalist movement in Montreal.) In the end, mercifully, there doesn’t appear to be any desire to dutifully represent the “cause” of CanPo as a unified Maple-syrupy front of sweet golden goodness for the pancake of Buffalo...

Local trees & c.

mike watt talks w/michael t. fournier about "double nickels on the dime"

Teen years I wrote this song called "Mr. Bass King Outer Space" about blowing everybody away with a bass solo. I never wrote a song, you know? We had no thing in it - no craft. You know? It's just words. Words were like - Bob Dylan was some weirdo showed up at Thanksgiving muttering. All the other words, T. Rex, Alice Cooper. Alice Cooper, you didn't think twice with Alice! You know, he's in a band - "Be my lover." What does that mean? Well, you don't even think twice about what anything means. It's like lead guitar. They're just sounds. Smoke off water - what is that? Smoking the bong? What I found out later, it was literally about a fire or something, but that didn't help. I liked it better when we thought it was bongwater, bong smoke. We didn't know what any of them - what words were for. Words come on us. Sorta like a Lenin pamphlet, you know? What is to be done. What is to be done? But then the Trotsky thing, with the pen knife, all the art. He murdered a lot of people - the pen knife. The art uses the pen knife, it is what is to be carved, eh? We know this - it's like a bicycle, after a while you don't fall down, but is it really about riding with no hands, upside down, on one wheel? No. Where are you going to fucking take the bike? I told those kids at the bass seminar - there's granddaddy fusion at the end of the hallway - "more notes, more notes!" - luckily, physics punishes, because the more notes you play, the littler we get. Same thing with writing.

not-seen-by-me Barbara Stanwyck picture His Brother’s Wife (1936) (with Robert Taylor) on TCM tonight...

Ange Mlinko on Rainer Maria Rilke

Octopus snatches coconut and runs

film of the decade Inland Empire

...is also Laura Dern's bravura role. As her character falls down the rabbit hole she switches with razor-sharp precision from Hollywood princess to Southern belle to downtrodden housewife to battered street prostitute, inhabiting each one with absolute clarity and truth. A marathon brutal monologue, delivered to a silent, sweaty bald man in glasses in a seedy back room, is so shockingly intense and real that you feel you are living it with her. It must be the most remarkable performance by an American actress in the last decade, and it was almost completely ignored...

INLAND EMPIRE, a round-table Alternate Take

Local trees &c.

Sudbury Neutrino Observatory

Inside the chamber is an enormous Buckminster Fuller sphere with 9600 photomultiplier tubes which itself sits inside a forty foot acrylic sphere filled with 1,000 tons of heavy water...

YouTube - 5 Neat Guys

on Jamie Reid's Gerry Gilbert Blog a bit from my old essay CITIZEN GILBERT

Big Love - A Juniper Creek Christmas

Local trees

Sagittarius - My World Fell Down

YouTube - The Shmenges - The Last Polka (Part 1)

album of the year: Fire In My Bones

The majority of this music has never been reissued on CD, or in any other form (most tracks were originally released on regional independent labels). Most post-WWII compilations of African-American gospel music naturally concentrate on the astounding quartet and solo vocalist sounds made during the music’s Golden Age. Fire In My Bones attempts to address and collect more neglected sounds from that era (and on to the present day). Dozens of traditions are represented. Some go back hundreds of years while others seem to have been arrived at as soon as the tape began to roll. Field recordings and studio tracks are all mashed together, with solo performances next to congregational recordings, hellfire sermons next to afterlife laments. Leon Pinson, Elder & Sister Brinson & the Brinson Brothers, Grant & Ella, Straight Street Holiness Group, Theotis Taylor, Brother & Sister W B Grate—these artists will now be just a little less obscure...

Tompkins Square Records

nice article on actor Richard Farnsworth & David Lynch's great Straight Story--

Focusing on people relegated to the fringes of American society, the challenge in The Straight Story for the filmmakers and the viewer is to listen carefully, adapting our frenetic pace to the seemingly bland but hypnotic patterns of this film. Seeing this movie can be one of those cinematic experiences that stays with you for days after, maybe even changing the viewer for the better. Filmed in a glorious Autumn, the bucolic aspects of this movie, do not mask the darkness that is there. Straight’s family is marked by estrangement, poverty, a sorrow and injustice related to an incident that occurred when a daughter’s children are removed from her care following a tragic fire. Beneath the understanding way that strangers approach and listen to Alvin’s cockamamie reasons for traveling in such a hazardous fashion, there is an awareness of the danger he faces and the implicit possibility that one of the strangers might harm him or try to have him committed to a nursing home against his will. Those things happen in this world, but, as this movie makes clear, sometimes generosity, bemusement, genuine curiosity and respect survive too...

on TCM tonight: Guest Programmer: Neko Case

A Woody Allen fan, Case chooses Radio Days (1987) as her favorite Allen film with its “celebration of the entertainment industry.” Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957) remains “shocking” to her in its satire of the corruptive power of television. She admires Orson Welles (“a force of nature”) and Joseph Cot- ten (“the foxy Everyman”) in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949). The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) casts a spell on her with its Oscar Wilde dialogue and appeal to “art-history nerds.” A bonus in Case’s selections is a collection of Dogville shorts from the 1930s...

Tsawawssen Ferry Terminal 0730

Norman Rockwell’s Photo Realism

Norman Rockwell’s rosy illustrations of small town American life looked so photographic because his method was to copy photographs that he conceived and meticulously directed, working with various photographers and using friends and neighbors as his models...

The Great Scrapple Correspondence of 1872

In the winter of 1872, the Letters page of The New York Times was briefly invaded by scrapple.

It all started with one reader’s paean to his favorite breakfast food. Calling himself “EPICURE,” he pronounced the dish—a Spam-like slab of cornmeal and pig parts—both delicious and inexpensive. If anyone was interested, he continued, he’d be delighted to share his good lady’s recipe...